Carrier grade telecommunication service deployments may have stringent service availability requirements and may further require geographical redundancy support. Traditionally, telecommunication systems are built using specialized hardware based components that support 1+1 redundancy or N+K redundancy. Each hardware component provides one or more services and the component is usually deployed as a fixed package of these services. Frequently, desire to optimize hardware component cost during deployment drives the need to package multiple service components together and associate them with specific hardware components.
Furthermore, the telecommunication system component packages usually come with a variety of configuration options which makes testing and deployment a challenging endeavor. It is quite common for new service development and deployment cycles to last months or even years in the telecommunication service industry. Also, system capacity expansion requires careful planning due to hardware procurement lead times and complicated hardware installation and setup procedures. As a consequence, telecommunication systems are often overprovisioned to accommodate unexpected growth in service usage.
Virtualization technology and the advent of cloud based Infrastructure-as-a-Service systems all the deployment several services in virtualized environments that support elastic scalability and facilitate rapid deployment through agile continuous integration procedures. This presents an opportunity for realizing substantial cost benefits by operating carrier grade telecommunication systems on modern cloud based infrastructure. However, applying methods of elastic scaling to carrier grade telecommunication services, which are subject to stringent 99.999% service availability and service continuity requirements, result in various challenges.